phoebe waller-bridge – Pop Culture Nerd

Must-Binge TV: FLEABAG Season 2

I’ve been off wandering the countryside and mostly staying off the internet, but I had to resurface when I realized Fleabag season 2 drops Friday on Amazon Prime.

So I’m sticking my head out of my cave to holler, “DROP EVERYTHING AND WATCH FLEABAG NOWWWW!”

I don’t have appropriate words to describe the brilliance of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I have a full-on crush on her brain and its creations. You might know her work from Killing Eve‘s season one, but before that came Fleabag‘s award-winning season 1. Watch that if you haven’t already, and then dive into s2.

This season sees Andrew Scott (Moriarty on Sherlock) guest starring as a hot priest (Fleabag’s term for him) hired to officiate the wedding of Fleabag’s dad and stepmom-to-be, played with passive-aggressive perfection by newly minted Oscar winner Olivia Colman.

Fleabag and the priest, who’s not above throwing around F-bombs, do an unpredictable dance of sexual tension, religious and philosophical exploration, and soul revelation, all terrifying to Fleabag. She’s also carrying a big secret for her prickly sister, Claire, a feat made difficult by Claire’s dickish husband constantly harassing Fleabag.

Like s1, this season is hilarious and poignant and thought-provoking and ohsogood. Also like s1, Waller-Bridge claims this is the end. It’s smart of her to quit on a high, but I can’t help but hope we’ll see Fleabag again.

1 Comments

Weekend Watching: KILLING EVE, A QUIET PLACE & BLOCKERS

I had a lazy weekend—well, lazier than usual—and ended up watching lots of TV and movies. Good thing they were mostly entertaining. Here are some brief thoughts on the ones worth mentioning.

Killing Eve

I’ve been salivating for this since I heard about it back in February. BBC America’s comedic thriller stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer and is written and exec produced by Fleabag‘s brilliant Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whom I’ll follow anywhere (she’s next up in Solo).

Oh plays Eve, a bored MI-5 agent on the trail of Comer’s international assassin, Villanelle, and the two actresses are great foils for each other. Eve is messy and quirky but razor sharp when it comes to work. Villanelle is a slick sociopath, but Comer’s performance and Waller-Bridge’s writing manage to add ink-dark humor to the brutal kill missions. Even the soundtrack is funny.

The adaptation is much better than the novellas—all gathered in Codename Villanelle—by Luke Jennings, who, while depicting two strong female protagonists, still wrote them from a male POV. Plus, Eve is white and 29 on the page; I love that Oh got the part. She, Comer, and Waller-Bridge bring the women vibrantly and gleefully to life.

A Quiet Place

This thriller about monsters who track their prey by sound is watching-through-your-fingers suspenseful, and its 6-person cast, including John Krasinski (also the diretor) and Emily Blunt, gives fantastic performances, almost entirely without dialogue.

My two quibbles are 1) we see too much of the creatures too soon and 2) we don’t know what their motivation is. Monsters need motivation, too. Take something like Aliens and it’s clear why the mother alien is hostile. A Quiet Place‘s creatures seem nasty for nasty’s sake.

But if you like fine acting and being kept on the edge of your seat for almost an hour and a half, this movie is worth a look.

Blockers

Three teenage girls make a sex pact to lose their virginity on prom night. Their parents find out and set out to stop the kids. Hijinks ensue.

I appreciate the questions Blockers poses—if boys are celebrated for losing their virginity, why can’t the same go for girls? Why is sex even bad?—but the movie still subjects viewers to really crude gags involving butts and balls. You’ve been warned.

Bottom line, I found more to cringe at than laugh at.

What did you watch this weekend?

4 Comments

Funny Shows For Sad Times

If you’ve been finding yourself weeping for the past week, perhaps you could use some laughter. Why not check out the hilarious shows below? You’re probably on the couch already.

What I especially like about these programs, all half-hour, is that they don’t force silly gags or cheap toilet humor on you. They’re funny and poignant because sometimes there’s only a fine line between the two.

Check them out and hopefully your spirits will be lifted, too, at least while you binge.

Schitt’s Creek (PopTV.com)

This stars Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy—are you laughing yet? The Christopher Guest ensemble players portray Johnny and Moira Rose, a rich New York couple who, due to their investment advisor’s illegal activities, loses everything. Except a small town they bought as a joke, a place called Schitt’s Creek.

The town is so pathetic the government doesn’t want to seize it, so the Roses and their millennial kids, David (Dan Levy) and Alexis (Annie Murphy), go to live there. Cultures clash as they try to coexist with the small-town folk, who are worlds away from the Roses’ hoity-toity friends from New York society.

As expected, O’Hara and Levy are funny; Moira is an actress so O’Hara gets to be ridiculously dramatic. But the younger Levy—also the show’s cocreator and cowriter with his dad—Murphy, and the actors who play the townies are fine comedic talents, too (save for Chris Elliott, who’s just gross and annoying).

Fleabag (Amazon Prime)

This six-part BBC comedy series stars one of my favorite discoveries this year: Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She creates, writes, and stars in her own shows, and does all of it with aplomb. She just won the Groucho Club Maverick Award for this show, beating out Lin-Manuel Miranda. Do I have your attention now?

Fleabag (a nickname; we never learn her real name) is a young woman trying to move on after the death of a loved one. That doesn’t sound funny at all, I know, but the show has many absurd, wacky, laugh-out-loud moments. That’s where Waller-Bridge’s talent lies.

She makes you laugh one minute, and the next she’s hitting you between the eyes with something profound. Or vice versa. Life is like that in Waller-Bridge’s world, where laughter and pain are often not far from each other.

Crashing (Netflix)

After Fleabag, if you immediately want to see what else Waller-Bridge has done, check out Crashing, another absurd dramedy about six people living in an abandoned hospital to save money on rent. Think Friends but much weirder and with much less fancy digs.

Superstore (NBC)

America Ferrera heads the cast playing employees at a Walmart-like store, except here the employees are more outlandish than the customers.

But the characters aren’t weird for weird’s sake. The writing and acting show why they behave the way they do, which engenders more understanding and compassion than judgment toward them. And isn’t that what we need more of?

Have you seen any of these shows? What are you watching these days to lighten your mood?

Photos: Schitt’s Creek/CBC; Waller-Bridge/BBC; Superstore/NBC

5 Comments